City rises on tide of half-full attitude

Memphis is a city not so much under construction as reconstruction.

We’re turning a white elephant of an arena into a largemouth bass of a retail tourist attraction.

We’re transforming a mothballed mail-order processing store into a mixed-use urban village.

We’re tapping a driedup old brewery to become a wellspring of urban restoration.

We’re even turning water into vodka at two new microdistilleries taking advantage of our greatest natural resource, our blessed artesian well water.

“It really does make our vodka taste better. It’s a little smoother, a little sweeter,” Alexander Folk, one of the co-owners of the new Big River Distilling Co., told reporter Wayne Risher last month.

Big River is co-owned by the sons of FedEx founder Frederick W. Smith and the grandsons of Folk’s Folly Prime Steak House founder Humphrey Folk.

The entrepreneurial spirit and indomitable soul of Memphis keep rolling on.

Look around and see the reconstruction, renewal and revival taking place in just about every part of town.

The Memphis glass is half full.

It’s also half empty — as we learned in “Our Financial Mess,” a sobering series of investigative stories led by our world-class reporter Marc Perrusquia.

Memphis is a lot like my beloved United Methodist Church, where fellowship is another word for potluck. We’re losing numbers, but we’re gaining weight.

During the past 50 years, as the city limits doubled in size, the population inside the I-240 loop declined by 190,000 people.

The city’s overall population has held steady, thanks to our higher-thanaverage birthrates and — as Perrusquia described it — our “decades-old grow-or-die strategy of annexa--

tion.”

Like a jilted lover, Memphis continued to pursue (through 62 annexations) mostly middle-class taxpayers who left for good, bad or ugly reasons.

Like any relationship, it’s complicated. But regardless of why, the more we chased people who didn’t want to live here, the faster and farther they went and the more costly became the pursuit.

Now we’ve got the same number of people living on double the land, and a higher percentage of those people are poor, which leads to more challenges.

Now we’re drowning in debt and overextended by long-term obligations.

Just the interest payments on the debt exceed $168,000 a day — which is a bit less than we’re paying two retired police directors each year.

Because of our benevolence, 1,245 ex-employees retired with full pensions in their early 40s; 553 retired with 15 or fewer years of service; 94 are collecting more than $60,000 in annual pensions.

The series explains what happened and why. There’s more than enough blame to go around. But we can’t keep refinancing the place or applying for more credit cards.

We’ve got to start paying off what we owe, although it’s not that simple.

We’ve got to do it in a way that doesn’t scare or chase more people away. At the same time, we’ve got to help people who do live here and keep attracting more people who want to live here.

A lot of people want to compare Memphis to bankrupt Detroit. But Memphis is solvent and working sooner and smarter to solve its financial problems.

Dr. Phyllis Betts, a sociologist who taught urban affairs and public policy at the University of Memphis for 20 years, says a more apt comparison is Pittsburgh, a Rust Belt city that is recovering from losing half its population.

“As in Pittsburgh, asset-focused redevelopment is one of the positive trends in Memphis that appears to be stabilizing the population,” Betts wrote in a guest column for the series.

According to Betts, the number of people moving to Memphis has doubled since the late 1990s, and is now averaging 34,000 people a year. A third have college degrees.

What’s bringing people here? I would argue that it’s our assets and our liabilities.

We’re attracting a younger, highly educated, urban-friendly “creative class” to Memphis with walkable, bikeable, entertaining and affordable, mixed-use areas such as South Main and Harbortown, Broad Avenue and Highland Row, Cooper-Young and Overton Square, Uptown and Crosstown, Beale and Brookhaven Circle.

We’re also bringing in a more compassionate creative class — social entrepreneurs who want to help rebuild lives as education reformers, nonprofit pioneers and other forms of “innovative, poverty-focused problem-solving.”

As Betts wrote, “Even robust economic development strategies that bring good-paying jobs to Memphis will fall short if the legacy of poverty and low wages leaves too many Memphians ill-prepared to rise with the tide.”

The Memphis glass is half full, and we’re constructing — and reconstructing — more urban springs and spigots.

It’s also half empty and leaking.

Fortunately, we have all the water we need.